Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and President of Tools for Humanity, believes that the advances made by today’s leading AI models could lead to a broad restructuring of the social economy.
Altman recently unveiled a vision in which “computing” as a resource and asset could replace cash income as a means of providing universal basic income (UBI), during a recent interview on the All-In podcast.
While the interview touched on a number of topics, it quickly turned to the dangers of artificial intelligence and how humanity will deal with threats ranging from human extinction caused by artificial intelligence to labor displacement. Regarding the previous topic, Altman acknowledged that there may come a time when artificial intelligence models become capable enough to pose such threats.
The solution he proposes is to create a global supervisory board with the power to regulate the largest projects, thus leaving startups relatively unfettered by regulations that might stifle growth.
“I believe there will come a time, in the not-too-distant future, when frontier AI systems will be capable of causing significant global damage. And for these types of systems… I would like to see some sort of international agency looking into the most robust systems and ensuring reasonable safety testing is done.
Altman assured the All-In team that GPT-4, OpenAI’s current cutting-edge production model, poses no “significant” threat to human life.
On the jobs front, Altman is a well-known advocate for universal basic income. Aside from OpenAI, he also runs Tools for Humanity, a company whose main product is the Worldcoin cryptocurrency and identity verification platform. Worldcoin is given to anyone who wishes to verify their humanity. After that, its holders receive a monthly symbolic salary.
Speaking to the All-In team, Altman criticized government poverty assistance programs as often ineffective and called for a simple, respectful approach to universal basic income:
“I’m not a big fan of the way the government has handled most policies designed to help poor people, and I kind of believe that if you can just give people money, they’ll make good decisions and the market will do its job.”
He went on to point out that giving people money will not solve all problems, adding that it “certainly will not make people happy.” But he ventured that “it might solve some problems and might give people a better prospect of helping themselves.”
As for why he is a champion of universal basic income, Altman said he and his colleagues realized in 2016, when they started taking AI seriously, that it could have far-reaching implications. They started doing studies and found that universal basic income showed promising results.
Now, Altman thinks the universal basic income model itself may be ready to be upended:
“2016 was a very long time ago. …I wonder if the future is more like universal basic computing than universal basic income and everyone gets a slice of GPT-7 computing and they can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to someone to use in cancer research.
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